Blake: Brewing up a Colorado beer ballot battle

The supermarkets already are. They're likely to make one of their periodic pushes to change Colorado law so that they can all sell full-strength beer, wine and — perhaps, as opponents suggest — any kind of liquor.

Under current statutes only one store in a supermarket chain can sell all types of alcohol. The others are limited to selling 3.2 beer.

Colorado Consumers for Choice is the vehicle for the pending initiative. It's headed by Chris Howes, lobbyist for the Colorado Retail Council and other interests.

The current system is "antiquated, unfair and inconvenient for our customers," he said this week. Three-two beer is "an anachronism."

The grocers have already begun their campaign with a website that urges you to sign their petition.

Recommended Stories For You

Says the petition: "Since 1933, we have invented soft-serve ice cream, rock-n-roll, space travel, the Internet and the cellphone, but you still can't buy real beer or wine in a Colorado grocery store. … It's past time to modernize the state's liquor code."

They're hoping the impact of social media will help them succeed where previous efforts failed.

Howes and the supermarkets are right, of course; the liquor laws are ridiculous. But changing them won't be easy. The package stores are an effective trade group. They have beaten back all previous efforts to liberalize the laws, which date back to the end of Prohibition, more than 80 years ago.

It's also possible that some dewy-eyed freshman lawmaker will introduce a bill this coming session to do the same thing. But such a bill has no chance. That's because every lawmaker has several liquor store owners in their districts, and they carry more clout that supermarket managers, who aren't owners and tend not to lobby.

As for the wine and beer consumer, he has no lobbyists at all.

We don't know exactly what will be in the initiative; Howes maintains there is not even draft language yet. "When people understand the wackiness of the antiquated laws, they'll be on our side," he predicted.

It will take more than that, because lawmakers and voters alike are instinctively against big businesses like supermarkets ganging up on small, independently owned liquor stores. The groceries are going to have to give as well as take. For instance, current law not only prohibits groceries from selling strong beer, wine and booze, it also prohibits liquor stores from selling any kind of food except what goes into drinks, such as limes, onion, olives, cherries, mixes and the like. But not beer nuts, because they don't go in the beer.

Liquor stores don't want to sell food anyway, you say? Perhaps not. But if so, why is the prohibition written into law? A successful initiative is going to have to allow the liquor stores to expand their product lines to the same extent that it lets the supermarkets expand theirs.

Jeanne McEvoy of the Colorado Licensed Beverage Association, the liquor stores' trade group, is convinced the groceries ultimately want to sell all liquors, because there's more profit in the hard stuff than in beer or wine.

But it's unlikely the groceries will start by trying to grab everything at once.

Howes would love the liquor stores to come to the table to work out a compromise, but "for the last six or seven years they've had no interest in negotiating."

McEvoy confirmed her group's stubbornness. "They say there's got to be a compromise," she said. "Well, there doesn't. Where is that written?"

If the supermarkets do come up with a proposal that makes the ballot and is passed, that should just be the start of the campaign against Colorado's silly liquor laws. Next to go should be the prohibition against owning more than one liquor store, which requires expansion-minded owners to set up complex and bogus corporate structures to avoid prosecution.

After that, there's the requirement that all alcohol be sold to retailers through wholesalers, which can add an unnecessary middleman. If wholesalers are useful, they don't need to be established in law.

Former Rocky Mountain News columnist Peter Blake wrote this for the Independence Institute, a free market think tank in Denver.